Countering the "Political Issues Raised by Some Sections of the Archaeological Community"

On page 21 of Gordon Heritage's article to which I referred in the post above, the author talks about "the political issues raised by some sections of the archaeological community". This part of the article includes a tendentious passage that deserves more detailed comment. According to the author of this text tekkies themselves have neglected the "political" battle:

This all stems from our insistence on justifying our hobby and  explaining the case* for removing finds from ploughsoil  after they lose their archaeological context** we have put so much effort into pushing the point that we are saving finds from agric(sic)-chemical and plough damage*** that we have become open to criticism when searching pasture.

* Actually this case is far from being made, this is an extremely contentious 'justification' for destroying archaeological patterns, like saying the best way to save endangered rhinos from dying of disease in the wild is shoot them all. 

** The author seems oblivious to the idea that archaeology is not always about digging "down", but that there are a whole load of techniques for examining the spatial distribution of archaeological material precisely across the surface, gridded fieldwalking, shovel pit sampling etc. The existence of such techniques indicates that there IS archaeological information contained in the horizontal distribution and spatial associations of artefacts, even if they are in derived deposits and not in vertical archaeological stratigraphic sequences. 

*** Not everybody is taken in by this self-serving artefact-centred argument see the points above. It has yet to be demonstrated that the artefacts "saved" are properly curated in the majority of the ephemeral private collections they are removed to. The evidence however seems against that idea.